Colleen grinned at the flirtation and backed up to take his vacated spot, still gazing at the photo. Her mom, or the woman who had given her life. The laughing woman in the white dress on her dad’s arm looked like her. Curly dark hair, large wide-set eyes, a smile that reached high onto her cheekbones. Yet, this Colleen had a face full of freckles, a smattering across her nose and cheekbones like sprinkled stars.

“You know those people?” a voice asked behind Colleen and she turned, her hand reflexively coming over her heart. She faced a gentleman, most likely her dad’s age, holding a tray teetering with beer and whiskey glasses.

“Partly, yes.”

He nodded his head toward the wall. “This is the wall of O’Sheas.”

Colleen took in the man’s kind blue eyes and furrowed forehead. “That’s my dad.” She pointed at the photo.

The man set the tray on the bar and threw his hands in the air. “Sully told me you might be coming tonight. You’re Colleen.”

She blushed, feeling the heat of it in her face and under her arms. “Yes.”

“Welcome.” He took her right hand in both of his wide callused palms and pumped her arm up and down. “Let me take your coat.” Which he did, and hung it on a hook behind the bar. “Expect you’ll be staying awhile?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Sit.” He pulled out a bar stool and then placed two fingers in his mouth to emit a loud whistle. The bar crowd was silenced and he hollered out, “We have Colleen O’Shea with us here tonight. Now you make her feel welcome.”

The remainder of the night was loud and blurred and she felt as if she were in a lucid dream. The accents, deep and rich, carried her along. She sipped whiskey and met second cousins and a slew of townspeople who had all adored her mom, and a few who remembered and loved her dad. Colleen O’Shea had been an only child, they said, and look now, they exclaimed, her only daughter here at last. “We knew you’d come back one day,” almost all of them said. “This land draws people home.”

There were the few, a pair of sisters who’d been Colleen’s best friends, who blamed Gavin for the loss of Colleen. And they told her so. “If your da had just stayed where he was meant to be, and married the woman he was meant to marry, none of this would have happened.” After all of the backslapping and hugs, Colleen was speechless at the sudden turn of tide, at the implications cast as quickly as a slap across the face.